Letters to the Editor

Oct. 6, 2017

The Snowy Day

To the Editor:

I read with great pleasure Maria Russo’s “Stamp Notes” (Sept. 24) on the occasion of the United States Postal Service’s issuing of a stamp to honor Ezra Jack Keats’s “The Snowy Day.” While she is correct that “no black child had ever been the protagonist of a full-color American picture book” before Keats, the valorization of Keats as the embodiment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech elides the great body of work by African-American writers and illustrators for children before 1962.

Ellen Tarry’s picture books of the 1940s and 1950s, illustrated by the great black cartoonist Oliver Harrington, used color printing, as did the illustrations for Countee Cullen’s “The Lost Zoo” in 1940. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps issued illustrated texts in black and white, like “Popo and Fifina: Children of Haiti” (1932) with images by E. Simms Campbell, and Carter G. Woodson’s black-run publishing house devoted itself to children’s literature, offering texts like “The Picture-Poetry Book” (1935), illustrated by the grande dame of African-American painting, Lois Mailou Jones.

In Keats’s postage stamp, we find validation that a white artist’s apolitical version of black childhood changed the stakes for white readers in the early 1960s, but black writers and artists had been dreaming childhood in various incarnations, depicting the joys, pleasures and political investments of children since the Harlem Renaissance.

KATHARINE CAPSHAW STORRS, CONN.

The writer is the author of “Who Writes for Black Children” and “Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance.”

The Internationalists

To the Editor:

While bowing before Max Boot’s analytical prowess, I must differ from him on two details of his otherwise excellent review of “The Internationalists,” by Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro (Sept. 24). The first, which is borderline nit-picking, is his assertion that the spasmodic fighting in western Ukraine constitutes “cross-border conflicts between internationally recognized states.” Although most would agree that the insurgents are controlled and supplied by Russia, that state has always denied direct involvement and can claim that the Ukrainian fighting resembles the frequent proxy invasions of adjoining states by terrorist groups from Somalia, Sudan and elsewhere.

More serious is Boot’s dismissal of Aristide Briand as “justly forgotten.” Briand was one of the most competent statesmen of the 1920s and ’30s and came the closest of anyone to heading off World War II.